Omoto

Omoto's first collision with the Japanese state, in February 1921, targeted Onisaburo Deguchi personally. Police arrested him and several followers on charges of lese majeste and violation of the Newspaper Law, and he spent 126 days in jail before trial. An Osaka court convicted him, the Supreme Court overturned that verdict for what it called a serious defect in the ruling, and the government pursued retrials for years without ever reaching an enforceable conclusion; the case finally closed only through an amnesty following Emperor Taisho's death in 1926. Omoto did not merely survive the six year proceeding, it grew through it, membership climbing past two million by the early 1930s under the cosmology Onisaburo spent the same period dictating into the eighty one volumes of the Reikai Monogatari.

The Second Omoto Incident, beginning December 8, 1935, admitted no comparable delay. Armed police raided the movement's twin centers at Ayabe and Kameoka in one coordinated action, arrested more than three thousand followers nationwide and destroyed every Omoto facility in the country, dynamiting Kameoka's sacred hall outright rather than merely closing it. Sixteen members died from torture and the conditions of imprisonment before the war's end brought acquittal on the underlying Peace Preservation Law charges, and the postwar constitution dropped the lese majeste counts entirely. Onisaburo, when the state later offered reparations, refused them, calling the money blood taxes taken from a defeated people. Omoto reconstituted itself under the religious freedom the new constitution guaranteed and continues today with a reported membership near one hundred seventy thousand, a fraction of its prewar peak but proof the second ban did not hold either.

Taniguchi studied English literature at Waseda and left without finishing, and the English is important: it gave him direct access to the American New Thought writers whose work was not yet available in Japanese. He worked for a period in the Omoto movement, a Shinto-derived new religion with a charismatic founder and a large following, and left after the state suppression of 1921 and his own disillusionment with the leadership.

In 1930 he began publishing a magazine of his own, Seicho no Ie, the house of growth. The magazine was the movement: readers wrote in, healings were reported, circulation grew rapidly, and an organisation assembled itself around the subscription list. The multi-volume work on the truth of life that he assembled out of the material sold in enormous quantities and remains the group's principal text.

The teaching is New Thought in its structure and Japanese in its furniture. The phenomenal world, with its sickness, poverty and conflict, is jissou no nai, without true substance; the real human being is already the perfect child of God, and suffering persists only while that is not recognised. He drew freely on Buddhist vocabulary, on Shinto reverence for the ancestors, and on Christian scripture, and held that the great religions describe the same reality, which is a position the American movement had reached by a different route.

Omoto's own founding pairs oddly matched figures. Deguchi Nao was an impoverished, largely illiterate widow who began receiving revelations from Ushitora no Konjin in 1892 and recorded them through a spirit writing she could not fully read back; Onisaburo Deguchi, who married into her family, gave that raw revelation its cosmology, its scripture and its institutions, and it was his expansive, sometimes reckless ambition that made Omoto the seedbed it became. In 1924 Onisaburo slipped out of Japan for Manchuria with a small band of followers, aiming to raise a spiritual army and install himself at the head of an independent Mongolia. The warlord backing the scheme turned on it once its ambitions grew too large, and Onisaburo and his followers, Morihei Ueshiba among them, were lined up for execution before the Japanese consulate intervened; the two men were shackled together for the journey home.

Ueshiba had come to Ayabe in 1920 already trained in Daito ryu jujutsu, and Onisaburo encouraged him to teach it to Omoto's own followers, the origin of the dojo Ueshiba built into aikido; aikido's stated purpose of reconciling rather than defeating an opponent still carries Omoto cosmology forward. Mokichi Okada took a quieter path through the same movement, joining Omoto in the 1920s before a 1926 revelation of his own led him to found Sekai Kyusei Kyo in 1935, the same year Omoto's own headquarters were being dynamited. A generation later, Yoshikazu Okada trained as a minister under that church before leaving it in 1953 to found Mahikari, a lineage running from Omoto through Sekai Kyusei Kyo rather than a direct line, but a lineage all the same. Few new religions anywhere have seeded as many successors as the one the state tried twice to erase.